Help or hindrance? GetUp’s gamble on fighting One Nation

Seventeen minutes into Pauline Hanson’s first address to the National Press Club, a yellow banner slowly unfurled behind the stage.

“I opposed a pay rise for workers while I took a $100,000 pay rise for myself,” it read, alongside an image of her wearing eight-bit sunglasses – a staple of online “thug life” memes.

The crowd gasped. Security moved quickly. The poster was removed and Hanson continued, with little more than a wry grin and a shake of the head.

Amid the lampooning, blacklisting and condemnation since, the GetUp acting chief executive believes Australia is making the same mistake that reshaped politics across Europe and the United States: underestimating populism until it is too late.

Ferris returned to Australia last year after more than a decade working on left-wing campaigns in Sweden, including for the Swedish Greens and the Reform Society, convinced that Australia was not immune to the forces reshaping Europe.

“This isn’t an Australian phenomenon,” Ferris says. “You only need to look at recent elections in the US; you only need to look at what’s happening in the UK; you only need to have spent some time, as I have, looking at what’s been happening politically in Europe for a number of decades now to realise that this is real, and this isn’t going away anytime soon.”

His diagnosis is that Australia, and much of the mainstream media, has treated Hanson and One Nation as a circus act rather than a serious political force.

“Our research is pretty clear that, in particular, on Pauline Hanson’s record on workers’ rights and industrial relations, when some of her newest and softest supporters see that record, they really don’t like what they see,” he says. A police investigation into the incident means he’s hamstrung about what he can say.

“If you sort of look past the noise of the coverage and the noise of the discussion about GetUp specifically, there is a powerful message there, which did reach millions of people who are not going in and closely examining the parliamentary voting record of politicians and parties.”

The stunt has re-energised GetUp’s activist base. More than $1 million in donations has flowed in since, its highest monthly total since 2022, while it added 1500 new monthly donors — the highest growth in more than a decade. It attracted more than 10 million views across social media channels.

Research commissioned after the Farrer by-election, where GetUp spent $600,000 on an anti-Hanson message to no avail, found 48 per cent of One Nation voters had settled on their vote in the first weeks of the campaign, before GetUp had run a single advertisement.

For Ferris, the finding confirmed something he had already come to believe.

“I think we’ve passed the era where an election is won during the course of an election campaign itself,” he says. “It is about the ground that’s laid in the years leading up to an election.”

Instead of concentrating spending during six-week campaigns, GetUp wants to spend the next two years prosecuting One Nation’s parliamentary record on wages, healthcare, cost of living and workers’ rights.